Contents introduction chapter. I. The general information about luise glück

CHAPTER II. ANALYSIS OF LUISE GLÜCK POEMS
2.1 The language of her works
Don’t listen to me; my heart’s been broken,” begins Louise Glück’s “The Untrustworthy Speaker”; to a flower in the title poem of her poetic sequence The Wild Iris (1992) are given the words, “whatever / returns from oblivion returns / to find a voice”.[13.34]
The voice of Glück’s poems arrests and engages, offering what Glück has said she seeks in poetry: “the sound of an authentic being,” an “immediacy, [a] volatility” that gives poems that achieve it “paradoxical durability.” Such authenticity is wholly distinct from “sincerity’s honest disclosure”: “Poems are autobiography,” she concedes, “but divested,” not just of “chronology” and “anecdote,” but of “personal conviction”; in the work the poet “strives to be free of the imprisoning self.”[14. 92-94]
The first single-authored book on one of America’s most important contemporary poets (a collection of essays edited by Joanne Feit Diehl appeared in 2005), Daniel Morris’s study of Louise Glück commands attention. As the title indicates, its aims are nonetheless modest. Quoting
generously, reading sympathetically, and providing pragmatic critical terms, Morris has written a useful introduction. Although the book does not proceed chronologically, the introduction offers a brief overview of the poet’s work, from the Plathian Firstborn (1968), through ten ambitiously
evolving collections including the oracular Descending Figure (1980), the plainspoken Ararat(1990), and the myth-saturated Triumph of Achilles (1985), Meadowlands (1996), and most recently Averno (2006). Morris sees Glück as primarily autobiographical, investigating, analyzing, and revising the self. He compellingly highlights her revisions of myth, religion, literature, and her own work. Reading Glück as “postconfessional,” he rightly links her with both modernist and so-called confessional precursors. Consistently keeping the poems in the foreground, he carefully avoids claiming too wide an interpretive reach for his critical paradigms, some of which persuade more fully than others. The most central paradigm—autobiography—proves the most problematic, but also the most suggestive for future work. Readers will benefit from Morris’s thorough bibliography and generous citations of others’ articles and book chapters. And they will be served well by his inclusion of the poems, many entire.
Morris approaches Glück’s work through several related themes: “desire, hunger, trauma, survival, commentary, autobiography, nature, spiritual witnessing” (2). These “keywords” govern chapters in Part One. The first usefully introduces “desire” and “hunger,” emphasizing not just the link between anorexia and writing in the now familiar “Dedication to Hunger,” but more importantly the “spiritual hunger” (Glück’s phrase) driving her work (36). Although he invokes theoretical models, desire in Morris’s account is primarily a relatively straightforward narrative of longing: for the beloved, for recognition from others, for poetic achievement. The chapter on “commentary,” perhaps the most original, argues that Glück’s poetry practices a form of textual interpretation, or “creative commentary,” corresponding with the Jewish tradition of midrash: “a reading process, an interpretive activity, [and] a creative cast of mind” (61). “[A]s an interpretive practice rather than as an essential identity formation,” Judaism provides “a model of revision” (97). Sustained readings of poems that rewrite Biblical stories, including the haunting “Lamentations,” trace different revisionary strategies.
Reading Glück next as a “trauma artist” and poet of “witness,” Morris calls her untrustworthy speakers “paradoxically reliable witness[es] to trauma, precisely because unreliable” (102); the poems “produce authenticity” through “unreliable narration” (112). While those paradoxes persuade, more frequently the trauma theory feels at odds with the poetry. The next chapter,
“Challenging Trauma Theory: Witnessing Divine Mystery,” is brief but suggestive, addressing poems engaged with the Christ story. Its argument—that they challenge, or modify, trauma theory—doesn’t speak to the poems’ resonance, to which Morris clearly responds; he might have further developed links with central themes discussed elsewhere: prayer, god as fiction, the conflict between spirit and flesh.
In Part Two, four chapters focus on individual volumes. The chapter on The House on Marshland (1975)’s revisions of romanticism aptly selects and juxtaposes poems, and introduces previous critics’ claims about gender; its argument is limited, however, by a definition of “nature” that leaves many questions unanswered. With its emphasis on family history, Ararat has been a touchstone throughout the study; earlier attention to striking poems including “Parodos” and “The Untrustworthy Speaker” leaves the chapter on this volume feeling thin.
The closing chapters confront the Pulitzer prize-winning The Wild Iris and Meadowlands, Glück’s most surprising, challenging, and consistently polyvocal works. These poetic sequences—the former spoken by a gardener, her flowers, and an imagined divinity; the latter sustaining a Joycean simultaneity of the quotidian and colloquial with the Homeric—test the limits of 585Morris’s model of autobiography. His rhetoric promises separation of author from poetic voice:
“the self as it appears in the poem” is “a construct, something made, not given” (28). His practice tends to conflate the two: beginning with a “psychobiographical” chapter (14) titled “Poems are autobiography”; viewing literary productions as “personal expressions” (36); describing how a volume’s “main speaker” (7)—a confusing term that seems to refer to Glück as a character in her own work—“dress[es] herself up as Penelope” (232) or as a series of talking flowers. Morris states that through the poet’s varying stances toward texts (“literature, scripture and myth”), she “at once expresses herself and deflects her autobiographical impulse” (3); language for Glück is “a medium that pivots between candor and disguise” (2). But candor and disguise do not tell the full story; we cannot account for poetic voice by assuming it emanates from self, nor from a version of self called the speaker. Seeing a poem’s speaker as a disguise misses the complexity
of voice as a fiction. As some of Glück’s best critics have shown, the simultaneous conjuring and dissolving of this fiction—what James Longenbach calls “the beautiful illusion of speech”—is at the heart of The Wild Iris’s power. [1
While the mismatch between Morris’s theory of authorial self and poetic voice as distinct and his practice of blurring the two frustrates, this frustration reveals that Morris’s terms stimulate, raising questions essential not only to our reading of Glück, but to the way we think about lyric poetry: persistent questions about its complex, seductive, and elusive
modes of severing “voice” from “sincerity,” autobiography, and “the imprisoning self.” [ 16. 92]


Ararat (1990) is the first of Glück’s books to contain a plot. In this chapter, I will be taking a look at selected poems in the collection to show how this plot is presented, its central psychological crisis is portrayed, and how the poet struggles to resolve the crisis by turning to memory. In Ararat, the poet has started an overarching plot about emotional recovery and self-renewal by looking to her distant childhood past. Unlike in Glück’s later collections, the poet does not use multiple voices to amplify private, psychological concerns in Ararat. There are no mythological and allegorical personae here, only the introspective confessional voice of the poet. Paul Breslin has written that Glück’s Ararat is one of the “most unabashedly autobiographical of her books” (110). Told in a sequence of lyric utterances, the apostrophic mode gives each poem a sense of being like a moment slowed down almost to a still. As one poem leads to the next, the book’s main plot becomes decipherable, a plot that is “goaloriented and forward-moving” (Brooks 12-13). The plot of Ararat’s introspective, as well as retrospective, journey is reminiscent of the groundbreaking 1962 black-and-white, short film, La Jetée, by Chris Marker, a story about time-travel entirely through still photos and a sole narrator’s voice--akin to Glück’s own poetic voice--which provides insight into what is seen in each stilled moment in time. The book shows the account of an inner life shaped by family relationships, an introspective journey in which the poet reconciles with the past and reaches new conclusions about her family and herself.
Glück’s poetry here brings to mind the work of Anne Sexton, a poet well-known for her confessional poetry who once confessed in an interview, “I am an actress in my own autobiographical play” (No Evil Star 109). Glück is also performing in her own autobiographical play; Mount Ararat is the name of the cemetery where her sister was buried and the poems are born out of distilled memories of a past marked by death. But more than just a biographical account of a past family life, Glück is in fact--in Ararat but more so in the books that follow--writing poetic autobiography, a genre defined by William Spengemann as one which transforms the reader, such that “the reader comes to share the autobiographer’s achieved state of being and view of the world” (“Poetic Autobiography” 113). In spite of the
consistently intense and personal introspection in Ararat, the poems in this book manage to allow for readers’ participation in this way; as the poet arrives at revelations about her own past, readers can also share and relate to these revelations.